“Let’s see, this team lost 99 games last year, 96 the year before and 98 the year before that, right? This is a much greater challenge than the one I faced in Baltimore in 1965.”
—Frank Cashen, introduced as New York Mets general manager, 2/21/1980

In the spring of 1980, the New Yorker’s Roger Angell was making his incomparable annual rounds and alighted on St. Petersburg for a morning B-squad game between Joe Torre’s Mets and their neighbors, Ken Boyer’s Cardinals. The rookie getting everybody’s attention that March was St. Louis’s big first baseman Leon Durham — “he is called […]

Four for four: the Mets went 4-for-4 today. They resumed baseball activities with a bang.

The long-rumored, long-postponed, long-hidden Mets Hall of Fame announced its class for 2010, its first class in eight years, and it’s a doozy. It’s so good I have this feeling I’m writing one of those “wouldn’t it be nice?” fictional blog […]

After his wildly wonderful 1983 homecoming, it was a kick in the gut (and probably lower) to watch Tom Seaver say goodbye a second time after a rightfully downcast Frank Cashen left him unprotected in the monstrosity known as the free agent compensation pool in January of ’84. The Chicago White Sox chose Tom Terrific to […]